Gossamer | poetry and photography inspired by Bluff's Club Hotel
Miharo Invercargill 2020
Gossamer starts with a poem. The poem, also titled Gossamer, was first read by Cilla McQueen at the Invercargill City Council ‘Consent to Demolish’ hearing for the Bluff Club Hotel in April 2019. Deftly woven around that original reading at the Invercargill City Council are a series of works presented at Miharo Murihiku’s new Don Street office and exhibition space. Gossamer brings together work by Cilla McQueen and Adrienne Martyn with both artists responding to the Bluff Club Hotel, a Motupohue Bluff landmark currently awaiting demolition. Gossamer, the poem, conjures social scenes of the Southern South Island. These images are recited gently into the space by McQueen via an audio recording playing in a room just off the main exhibition space. The poem steps gently through the history of the Club Hotel and Motupohue itself––gold miners, fires, a wedding breakfast––the lines traverse “time’s long warp”. Documenting a layer of history–architectural and social–which is disappearing, not just from Motupohue but much of Aotearoa. Martyn’s eight unframed photographic prints show the hotel rooms, not the view. No glimpse of sea is afforded; they are an empathetic act of documentation which captures the building staging its own demolition––exploding from the inside out. Bricks splayed and curtains billowing. There is beauty in the Club Hotel’s ruin––the curtains and wallpaper are tattered but the pressed tin ceilings and architectural detailing are still there. Martyn’s photography delivers a dose of the Club Hotel’s current, physical reality to complement and extend McQueen’s conjuring of the building’s ghost. McQueen presents Gossamer twice across the exhibition. Once as a recording and again as a series of hanging silk ‘pages’ which bring the poem into the physical space. McQueen’s silks are hung slightly out from the wall; with the door to Don Street open the silks dance lightly on the wall. The lines meander across the fabric, hand stamped by McQueen herself. A threnody, or lament, Gossamer refers to the “weft of language”––fabric, words, histories––all interwoven. Details on the silks include small, deliberate cigarette burns.Both the exhibition and the hotel’s history involve a confluence of personal histories, motivations, and interactions. As such, McQueen and Martyn include a ceramic work, WAHI MOTUHAKE / A special place I, by Irene Schroder, former Curator Visual Art of Southland Museum and Art Gallery, who passed away in late 2019. A connecting personality within the community and the exhibition, the exhibition is dedicated to Schroder’s memory.
In Gossamer, both Martyn and McQueen bring perspectives which are empathetic and active. McQueen’s poem drives a response which seems equal parts respect and irreverence. This is not a passive memorialisation. Both artists offer work which raises up the Club Hotel and its 150-years as a public space for gathering, sleeping, dancing, and drinking. Together, the works in Gossamer give a moment of focus and pause to a piece of history which is specific to Southern Aotearoa. A reflection on how we remember, or fail to remember, our recent past.Hope Wilson
Art New Zealand | Winter Issue 2020
Turn of a Century | The Archivists
Sarjeant on the Quay 2019
For Wellington-based photographer Adrienne Martyn the opportunity to photograph the emptying interiors of the Gallery over 2018 - 2019 was one that built on a continued interest in documenting buildings that have had a public life and are currently in hibernation and closed due to being earthquake prone. Prior to the Sarjeant it was Anderson House in Invercargill, a former private home that had been gifted to the city for use as art gallery, the Robert McDougall Art Gallery in Christchurch, and more recently the Southland Museum and Art Gallery.Martyn’s approach to the Sarjeant was two-fold, her extraordinarily sharp images depict the details in the gallery with a forensic eye but within the huge building she has approached the project with an eye that is akin to that of a formal abstract painter. The images combine close-ups of found scenarios - layers of line, planes of colour, textures, but they also record the removal of wall linings to reveal battens and the sketchy marks left behind.In addition to the photographs featured Martyn has also collaborated with designer Duncan Munro to create a moving image work that scrolls across and up, like a view master the viewer has no control of. Displayed in a small space, these moving images that depict the light airy spaces of the empty Gallery create a disconcerting feeling of claustrophobia. Martyn’s moving images suggest that the gallery has for the last hundred years been in a constant state of motion and change and will be going forward. The now empty walls have played host to hundreds of art works over the last century and will no doubt do the same for the next hundred years.Greg Donson, Curator and Programmes Manager